Nobody wants to see more construction on Park ave. after the interchange and subsequent street reparations, but I can’t help thinking that they should just get rid of the Cote-Ste-Catherine/Park intersection and create just one square intersection, with big, clearly marked crosswalks on all for sides (they could even widen Mt-Royal west of Park to make up the capacity and avoid a bottleneck). Take the diagonal section of Cote-Ste-Catherine south of Mt-Royal and extend the park.

Simple, square intersections are easier for everyone to navigate. The only losers would be residents of the apartment/condo buildings with frontage on Mont-Royal between Côte-Ste-Catherine and Park. They would have to put up with more traffic, but arguably less chaos and dangerous maneuvers.

Couldn’t the protesters have blocked access to the stock exchange tower from the inside, instead of blocking off the whole Delta? Couldn’t the protesters have asked the man to show his hotel key and let him pass through? That said, every time you raise tuition you make it so higher education is out of reach to more people, a deeply stupid action in a province where many of us can barely get out of high school. There are other ways for schools to raise funds.

Marx was right after all, qatzelok. Those protesters are going from being halfwits in themselves to being halfwits for themselves. They have nothing to lose but their hackneyed, leftist claptrap. Slackers of all countries, unite!

Antonio, your parent’s generation destroyed the environment while putting their own kids into debt before they were born. If you don’t think young people have anything to protest, you aren’t paying attention.

qatzelok: My agreement with the first sentence of your latest post doesn’t change the fact that the student contingent of the protesters (if not all of them) want society to keep subsidizing their unproductive, self-indulgent degrees in subaquatic basket-weaving and their fetish for iPads and iPhones. They are the modern-day equivalent of the lumpenproletariat so reviled by Marx in the latter stages of his life. They are slackers of the lowest order and the pepper spray and batons to clear them away did not come out soon enough.

Antonio, do you really think people go up against police batons and pepper spray because they’re lazy, spoiled brats, and not because they care about the way society is tending toward stronger oligarchy and fewer freedoms?

According to the cops he was waving what ‘may have been’ a knife. So they don’t know why they shot him? Replace their guns with tazers already, yeesh. Villanueva, Mohammadi… how many people have to die?

Not the first time this story has made the rounds: a plague of phone and gadget theft is rising in the metro, as everyone walks around dinking obliviously on their devices. But now police are getting more involved although, despite the photo there of a cop with a dog, it mostly seems to be an “awareness” campaign.

“Buried in snow for half the year”??? Come on! Even in real winters it’s not true. Can you imagine in the last years, especially 2012? It looks more and more like NY city winters here…… We tend to grossly exagerate our “winterity” factor.

Very nice piece, and it makes me want to go back to the Depanneur to sample more of her baked goods, which are quite good. She’s got to be a little tongue-in-cheek when she refers to the mountain as “a towering peak,” though. It’s a big hill, though we don’t want to admit it.